Looking at his background, Alan Jobbins wasn’t the obvious person to found the Plaid Cymru Historical Society. He was born in 1940 to a non-Welsh speaking working class family in Brecon. Generations on his mother’s side had lived in Brycheiniog and his father’s family had followed the Monmouthshire canal before settling in the town. His father was active with the railway workers’ union and voted for the Labour Party and, as a young man, Alan was a supporter of the Labour Party too, before he became active with Plaid, the national movement and started learning Welsh in the 1970s.
He was undoubtedly heavily influenced by his wife, Catherine, who was from Eifionydd and a first language Welsh-speaker. They met at a dance at the London Welsh Centre on London’s Gray’s Inn Rd in 1965 where they were both teachers among the thousands of other young Welsh people. After marrying the two accepted teaching jobs in Chingola in Zambia. Zambia had a big influence on Alan. In his old age he explained to me simply, “I saw other people like Zambia, had their own country and thought why can’t we have our own country too?”. He noted that education and administration were, and still are, entirely English in Zambia with no recognition of the indigenous languages. And he was shocked to see black boys coming on their knees to him because he was a white teacher using English names instead of native names. In Zambia, Alan drew comparisons to the colonisation of Wales.
Although he was from a Labour background (though his mother never voted) and although he did not like the Welsh lessons at the Brecon Boys’ Grammar School, there must have been a Welsh republican spark in him at a young age. In 1956 with the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II on a tour of the town, he refused to fly the Union Jack, and in 1956 the history teacher took Alan and a crew of A Level boys to see the unveiling of the new maenhir monument commemorating Prince Llywelyn’s death at Cilmeri.
During the 1980s with his three children in their teens, Alan threw himself into political life. He was one of the many Plaid members who collected food for the families of the striking miners outside the Asda supermarket in Coryton, Cardiff in 1984. As a young boy, I remember enjoying an egg and chips in a rainy café in Port Talbot after a rally in support of Gwynfor Evans over a Welsh channel in 1981. He wrote letters to prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union for Amnesty International, and raised money for the Solidarnosc union in Poland, and was active locally with the Anti-Apartheid movement. Although he was invited to stand for the Labour Party by a neighbour who was a local councillor, he declined, standing instead for Plaid in a local election in Whitchurch and receiving a threatening letter from the unionist Red Hand Movement.
In 1987 he was one of the first members of the Parliament for Wales Campaign and eventually became the organisation’s secretary. After the miraculous victory of devolution in 1997 the movement continued to lobby and campaign. With the success of the 2011 referendum and the transfer of legislative powers to Wales, the MSC came to an end and Alan edited a book by John Graham Jones telling the story of the movement.
In the early 1990s Alan’s practical imagination was sparked by the credit union movement – not-for-profit banks found in every parish in Ireland and other countries across the world, but, surprisingly not here in Wales. With that, once again, he and a small group of patriots set up the Plaid Cymru Credit Union. They were active in their small office at Plaid’s TÅ· Gwynfor at its various locations and then at TÅ·’r Cymry on Gordon Rd, Roath. The PCCU distributed and saved hundreds of thousands of pounds over a 30-year period before the Credit Union ended around 2019.
Alan was inspired to set up the Plaid Cymru Historical Society as he saw so many of the old Plaid passing away. He understood the importance of keeping a record of what he had achieved and pointed out that the other parties have their own societies and therefore Plaid Cymru needed one too.
He would be delighted to know that the Society is still going and still recognises the contribution of nationalists – big and small – for the Party. The greatest tribute to him would be to know that people remember him as a strong Welshman who fought for his country.
Siôn T. Jobbins
Alan Jobbins’s son